Sylvia Scarlett (1935)

Sylvia Scarlett is an American romantic film drama first released in 1935, directed by George Cukor.  The film is based on a novel by Compton MacKenzie and stars Katharine Hepburn, Cary Grant, Brian Aherne, Edmund Gwenn and Robert Adair.  Our overall rating for this film is: mediocre.


Fearing that he may be arrested for defrauding his employer, French widower Henry Scarlett decides to flee to England and start a new life.  He agrees to take his daughter Sylvia with him, on condition that she disguises herself as a boy.  En route, they strike up an acquaintance with a cockney swindler, Jimmy Monkley, who suggests they join up to con the good people of London.  Having failed to make a dishonest living, the three friends create their own travelling burlesque company.  Whilst touring Cornwall, Sylvia meets an artist and falls madly in love with him.  Alas, he appears only to be interested in his Russian muse...

Very loosely based on Compton MacKenzie’s novel (to the extent that the similarity between the two is almost non-existent), Sylvia Scarlett would be easily overlooked were it not for the fact that it marked the turning point in the career of actor Cary Grant, the first film in which his legendary screen charms registered on an American audience.  Despite his unconvincing cockney accent and a tendency to steal every scene with his deadly charisma, Grant is by far the best thing about this ramshackle production, which struggles hopelessly to meld melodrama and comedy into anything like an effective whole.   Looking frighteningly like a young Kenneth Williams for most of the film, Katharine Hepburn alternates between awfulness and brilliance - absolutely dire in the more sombre scenes, hilariously funny in the comedy sequences - and has such presence that we hardly notice her co-stars Brian Aherne and Edmund Gwenn.  Hepburn and Grant would work together - far more successfully - on three subsequent films: Bringing Up Baby (1938), Holiday (1938), and The Philadelphia Story (1940).  Not surprisingly, Sylvia Scarlett performed disastrously at the box office and was one of director Georges Cukor’s few flops.

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